Cafe opens in Tokyo staffed by robots controlled by paralyzed people
soranews24.com
soranews24.com
For instance: the guy who takes the ticket at the theaters in my city (Phoenix) is often a DD person. I thought this was odd, until I made the connection that this is literally a partnership between that company an the charity I'm talking about.
Most punk kids will get bored at this job, be snarky, not want to do it, etc. But some people with certtain DDs actually really enjoy it. They get to talk to people, they feel useful instead of feeling like a burden, they get a paycheck, etc. And for the company (harkins theaters) they get a happy, competent employee that enjoys their job.
It's a win win. And it's a perfect example of embracing the concept of "differently abled" instead of disabled. Made me really happy to learn that.
[0] https://www.employmentlawhandbook.com/wage-and-hour-laws/sta...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3869008/McDonald-s-...
If they do open a permanent cafe of this type I'll be sure to visit next time I'm in the area.
Thanks for this, now I'll be thinking about this all day. And I'll probably have intense discussions with people about the ethics and their feelings toward this idea at parties... Because I know I'll bring it up.
You could argue that able-bodied people are also pressured or even forced to take on careers. What fraction of piano tuners, sighted or not, could quit their jobs and live without being a burden to their families?
Most people don't like their jobs. Most people tolerate it and appreciate it though because for most people having a job is a lot better than not having a job. However I can't say I really know anyone who would continue doing their job if they weren't paid to do it.
More widely people truly work alone, companies need redundancy in the case of illness, vaction, or other such matters. Further, their is a benifit to be able to staff a team with a non integer number of people without splitting focus across multiple projects.
On top of that, new people really should be a net gain by week 3-4. It’s not about what they get done but the time they save other people. Inexperienced people may take longer to get up to speed, but they also cost less.
I mean.. in a way almost everyone is pressured into working. The vast majority of people work because they need to in order to survive.
Maybe I'm just dense or missing context but I don't really see why that would make you view the jobs in a negative light.
Understandable. But if there is a good value proposition many people could probably get over that.
Oh come on you paranoid luddi-
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-science-of-seeing-aro...
Computer vision researchers have uncovered a world of visual signals hiding in our midst, including subtle motions that betray what’s being said and faint images of what’s around a corner.
Oh shit! So much for aiming the camera at the floor, unless you want to be watched and overheard.
For example, maybe the human trains the robot so the robot can do some of the work itself and the human just fills in the more difficult work or the work that is never the same. For example, it would probably be hard to train a robot to put away clothes and toys in my kid's rooms, we'll get there eventually of course, but a human could do that part of it and then they could trigger the vacuum to run when they're done with the hard stuff. The human would also need to be "on call" to sort out a problem when the robot gets stuck or can't perform a task.
Maybe in a few decades, but right now, the last thing I want is an ai-controlled, or remote-controlled robot that is capable of scrubbing tile and cleaning caulking, moving my crap around, and wiping down hard-to-reach surfaces inside my apartment.
Unlike humans, if it is using too much force for the task at hand, it will have no awareness that it's likely to cause damage.
The hard part of cleaning isn't pushing a vacuum cleaner around.
Something that can reach up to dust the moulding on my ceiling can trivially knock over a standing lamp/potted plant/etc.
Even something as simple as the pin that switches my bathroom from shower to bathtub mode needs to be handled carefully (Otherwise, you'll snap the bathtub faucet off.)
Futzing with my dishes? Thanks, I'll figure out how to do it myself.
[1] And as I said, vaccuming is not the time-intensive part of cleaning. I have disposable income to blow on toys, I hate cleaning, but I'm not remotely interested in a roomba.
We have received both as gifts, and while they are slower and less powerful than the manual tools and electric vacuum cleaners, they can be tasked to clean the same area for much longer than my attention span for cleaning. It is also true that it is much easier to clean a mostly-clean floor than a more-filthy one. If you let the mop robot clean up for two hours, you can service the robot and then manually mop up the parts of the floor it couldn't do properly, in less time than manual mopping alone. With the sweeper, you never have to repeatedly vacuum over the same bit of popcorn, trying in vain to get the cleaner to pick it up, because all the larger floor debris are already in the robot's tray. And you don't need to worry about coins or Lego blocks in the vacuum bag.
But yes, cords are the Roomba's kryptonite. At best, it temporarily halts the cleaning process. At worst, it destroys your cords and also renders the floor sweeper inoperable. This alone destroys most of the utility. The sweeper cannot be left to operate unattended, because given enough time, it will always find a cord and try to commit suicide with it.
(I also don't have kids or dogs and don't stress out if I can't eat off the floor so having a very imperfect robovac that will run itself every day isn't a particular win.)
For my part, I live in a pretty blended downtown neighbourhood (Kitchener, Ontario), and balancing the need for affordable housing with the constant pressure to "clean up" certain areas and turn brownfields into glitzy new condo towers seems to be something that's largely managed at the city council level.
Today, of course, most mews have been converted into expensive standalone housing units, and most new integrated neighbourhoods are the result of council planning offices.
According to the article the waiters are paid about 9$ an hour. For a person in a destitute, remote small town jobs like this could be a really sweet side gig. It's not like they somehow would meet insular rich people anyway.
There's no reason to be cynical about this. Closing physical distance, which is one of the big contributors to lost opportunity is a good thing.
And most “rich people” want to live in desirable neighborhoods and poor people cant afford to do so, the residents also want their houses clean
It is currently incredibly unproductive to get your house cleaned
It is simply going to be much more efficient to let Pakistanis on Fiverr control your automaton
Even if the portal authenticates everyone... They'll still be one hack away from doing whatever they can to cause something to break for giggles
You sometimes see the idea that if a security feature can potentially be defeated, that is equivalent to that feature not existing.
That's true for a small class of problems, but in general it just shows an inability to see nuance.
Robot at home on stand by a la I,Robot movie
:"Good morning Mr. Anderson, our remote cleaning specialist is ready to clean your home, do you comply?"
pass code confirmation needed
:"Thank you, our services will take approximately 45 minutes. Please stand clear while we complete our task. Thank you Mr. Anderson. Have a Wonderful day!"
:"Please note that your next remote cleaning will require a renewal of your service agreement. Please take time to fill in the survey, confirm your subscription, and adjust your cleaning times, and thank you again for being a valued customer here at CleanTech"
LOL day dreaming is fun.
But - of course - the human interaction component is probably the most fulfilling for the operator.
But it’s a bit scary that the telecommute, which maybe hasn’t, I think, caught on - at least as a means to include in-demand, distributed “information” workers - might catch on at scale when purposed in a way that could physically exclude workers with “menial” jobs from the need to live locally.
Two of the three cofounders of the company were bedridden for long periods of time due to illness and wanted to help people in similar situations. They also employ several physically disabled people as remote workers.
It won't soon be taken away though, it already shut down. It was intended as a short pilot run. They plan to partner with some existing restaurants for the same sort of thing on a more permanent basis starting next year.
"Cafe opens in Tokyo staffed by waldos..." is a complete regression to me, though I suppose I'd click the headline just to find out what the hell a waldo is.
I never heard the term Waldo before. For those who are interested, more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator
And the robots at a car factory are monitored and frequently reprogrammed, stopped and started, etc by humans. So in many respects they are a waldo.
How do you draw the line? Is it by percentage of mechanisms? Or frequency of human input?
This seems much too assuming; sometimes technicalities are important to a good discussion, and of course this ties into the concept of sealioning[0] too, but revealing sealioning is a better tool to use against such people. Sealioning is where people don't recognise that you don't want to debate everything, so they continue to pester you. But once committed to a discussion, the tools of skepticism, doubt and rigor are all very useful. They may be useful (within some margin some of us might find agreeable or disagreeable) on a site almost expressly for interesting perspectives - Hacker News.
Often I'm happy that there's a "well actually" guy to provide nuance where it might be needed. Maybe it's not needed, but often it is. There is a time and place, and many of the author's examples are examples of the wrong time and place to "well actually". It doesn't mean the points are wrong.
And the jury is still out on if, when and how many people will be unemployed due to technical advances.
Similarly to rural Italy, France, Spain and USA, as people move to urban centers, rural population falls and small towns die. Japan’s demographic situation makes their case extra difficult at the moment.
On the other hand, the idea that this could become a weapon against disabled people (why are you staying on benefits? go out and get a job for yourself, you lazy paraplegic!) is... scary.
Especially given that it sounds mostly like a marketing gimmick, and that the very thing allowing them to interact with the world is not their own, but property of the store owners - i.e. they can't take the robot and move to a different caffe, they are tied to the benevolence of their boss.
Overall, this is much more distopic than utopic, and should be discouraged in this form; but the technology is interesting and could be an asset in the lives of many people.
This one restaurant can't employ more than a tiny fraction of paraplegics, so I doubt that will happen. Sure, irrational people could use that argument, but irrational people can already use a lot of irrational arguments. If remote operation of drones by paraplegics suddenly becomes a major part of society, so that operations like this restaurant would be a significant part of the policy debate, paraplegics would be better off and potentially not need benefits. Wouldn't that be an ideal goal?
One crucial issue is that the person who is being asked to do the work needs to feel that they can say no.
Finding ways to extract labour from people who would otherwise be a "pure burden" on society is obviously fraught with risks of exploitation.
If more than one tele-operated cafe is founded, then their employees will have exactly the same choice as most people who work in the service industry today. If only one tele-operated cafe company is ever started, then it will not be a very big social change. That's really all I'm saying.
Of course, we could imagine that one company would become gigantic and also the world's only employer of disabled people, but that concern applies equally to every commercial enterprise and people group. Any company could become a labor monopsony in the right (wrong?) environment.
What of paraplegics as restaurant managers, for instance? A related point from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on Affirmative Action[0]:
>Many factories and businesses prior to 1964, especially in the South, had in place overtly discriminatory policies and rules. For example, a company’s policy might have openly relegated African-Americans to the maintenance department and channeled whites into operations, sales, and management departments, where the pay and opportunities for advancement were far better. If, after passage of the Civil Rights Act, the company willingly abandoned its openly segregative policy, it could still carry forward the effects of its past segregation through other already-existing facially neutral rules. For example, a company policy that required workers to give up their seniority in one department if they transferred to another would have locked in place older African-American maintenance workers as effectively as the company’s own prior segregative rule that made them ineligible to transfer at all. Consequently, courts began striking down facially neutral rules that carried through the effects of an employer’s past discrimination, regardless of the original intent or provenance of the rules.
You're comparing a reality I am welcoming (disabled people being able to do something) with a possible future reality that I would welcome even more (the elimination of disability), along with a little bit of an even better future that might be even further away (the elimination of menial labor and the intellectual liberation of humanity). Sure, let's intellectually liberate humanity, but you aren't going to accomplish that by telling disabled people that they can't remote-operate commercial robots because you would rather them be intellectually liberated instead.
It's curious I'm being downvoted in my original comment for arguing for a more human approach to jobs and labour in society.
Past attempts to exclude political discussion from HN reflect a belief that, somehow, what Silicon Valley does can be fully understood without recourse to political thought.
The reality is that the HN community harbours readers with a wide range of political views, and those readers can downvote people with whom they disagree with total impunity. It's not good for the quality of debate, to say the least.
The same can be said about a lot of jobs. If your quit your job in a metal working shop you can't take your lathe with you, it belongs to your employer. A bus driver usually can't take the bus with him. A crane operator usually doesn't own the crane. The only thing different in this situation is that there is only one such cafe equipped with remote controled servers. But that just means we should encourage such cafes so that more spring up and workers can move to another employer with similar equipment.
> On the other hand, the idea that this could become a weapon against disabled people (why are you staying on benefits? go out and get a job for yourself, you lazy paraplegic!)
If there were enough job opportunities for disabled people, this "attack" would be entirely valid reasoning. After all they get benefits mostly because they can't participate in the job market in the same way other people can. In the reality we live in those job opportunities don't exist in sufficient quantity, so any such attacks are empty rhetoric.
>Overall, this is much more distopic than utopic
Giving disabled people a more normal life, enabling them to participate more in society, is distopic? Even ignoring any financial aspects and the interaction during the work day, just working in itself is shown to have positive effects on mental health.
Possibly you're taking it a bit far there, but at least in England I could see that being the case. The lengths they go to to stop people getting benefits are ridiculous.
For example, Scotland now has devolved powers for benefits, and are being much more generous: Having a baby? Here's £300. Is it your first? Here's another £300. Twins? Another £300. Then they make sure you can apply for all this online.
In England they tried not to have an online presence because, "we don't want to make it too easy for people to apply."
Source?
EDIT: Best Start Grant is public info though [0]
[0] https://www.gov.scot/policies/social-security/best-start-gra...
Someone may object that contracts are sacred. I don't care about contracts that are designed to conceal or perpetuate abusive behavior.
Here's some discussion from judges: https://www.buzzfeed.com/emilydugan/most-dwp-benefits-cases-...
This is what 'leaving it to the market' looks like. Now, some would say that the market should only involve decisions about where to spend your money or not, but every libertarian and market theorist I've ever talked to says that if someone is being unfairly excluded from the market they should sue for inclusion, so here we are. Now, it's true that for some businesses the costs involved in serving some customers (eg installing a ramp for wheelchairs) is likely to exceed the benefit of doing business with those customers which can hurt profitability. But given that people decided systematic exclusion was a sufficient ill to pass a law about it, either businesses make themselves reasonably accessible or a public agency does it and recoups the cost via tax.
Of course, it's often not so much the cost of the accommodation as the confrontational manner in which the issue is litigated. The culture of diametric opposition and winner-take-all outcomes that pervades our legal and political systems may be the biggest part of the problem.
Nothing scary about that, though if we get good enough at building interfaces for robots like this, the scary part could be how everyone ends up working "remotely" and we find ourselves in a WALL-E like chair all day...
If they get a contract, in most countries they'd just be remote workers with the same rights as any other worker. At many desk jobs, the employer can just lock your account and stop you from doing anything. Even a computer can do that these days. [0]
taking on the risk of owning an expensive bit of capital equipment that moves, requires maintenance and is put into use at an employer's facility doesn't sound like a fiscally sound idea for someone who has difficulties leaving their home.
As the sibling comment indicates about the UK, there's no reason why the benefits system or politics thereof has to have any connection with the reality of what disabled people can and cannot do.
The UK system has been restructured around "prove you cannot", with the interpretation of "can do occasionally with extreme effort" as "can do for a 40 hour workweek with no assistance". Many of these absurd judgements are overturned on appeal, but the goal is to discourage as many people as possible not save money or minimise bureaucracy.